Back in the mid 1980's, one of my favorite PC games was Sierra On-Line's Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter. As the star character Roger Wilco, one of your early tasks in the adventure was to crash-land an escape pod on an alien planet. In the pod, there's a special survival kit, but it's difficult to see due to the low-resolution graphics of the era. The only way is to type LOOK POD, at which point the game casually mentions that there's a survival kit.

If you find the kit and add it to your inventory before leaving the pod, you're all set. If not, poor you. It turns out that once you progress more than halfway through the game, saving along the way, you're going to need the kit to advance the plot. If you had forgotten to pick it up, or never saw it in the first place, you couldn't finish the game. All of your precious saved games were useless too, since you lacked the kit in each one of those as well. You were completely stuck and had to start the entire adventure over from the beginning.

To put it mildly, this suckedespecially if you were an impatient 13-year-old. And unfortunately, a very similar thing happens to smartphone users every day.

Back in April I reviewed Ateksoft's WebCamera Plus, a neat little app that turns your smartphone into a camera. Since it also functions as a one-click screenshot for Windows Mobile handhelds, I decided to purchase my own copy; it would come in handy for product reviews.

In order for WebCamera to work after the trial period, you need a registration code. But before you can put in the registration code, the program tells you to fill in the "Owner" name first. However, once the trial has expired, you can no longer enter the application to fill out the owner field. You can probably see where this is going.

In short, I paid the $19.90 online and received the registration code, but couldn't enter it into the app because it was locked and the Owner field was blank.

It goes without saying that a program should never trap the user. But I run into things like this on mobile applications all the time, as if the past 30 years of desktop software development never happened.

About the Author

Jamie Lendino is the Editor-in-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Pri... See Full Bio

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